Expert colour

In the final part of his three-part masterclass on creating Japanese-style digital skin art, Derek Lea explains how you can use the application's features to add stunning colour to your artwork.

Shares

The final stage when creating tattoo art is the addition of colour. Not only are areas filled with solid colours, but highlights and shadows are also added, giving your finished image added interest and a sense of dimension.

Illustrator's Layer function enables you to carefully build up custom objects of solid colour. Positioning the coloured object layers beneath the black brush stroke layers stops the colour from overlapping the outlines. You can work faster, because the overlapping brush strokes will hide minor imperfections. By altering the transparency values of individual objects it's possible to create highlight and shadow effects that aren't too strong or out of place. Varying Blending Modes also enables you to affect underlying object colours in a variety of different ways. For example, where a blue shape overlaps the tail of the fish, you can alter only the colour while preserving the existing shading.

If you've been following this series, feel free to use the file you created last issue as your starting point. However, if you're new to the series, we've provided one to get you started.

Just tuned in? You can find part one of this series here, and part two is right here.